Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

“You New York?”

I nod and reach out my hand to him. “Marty,” I say. He turns around and leads me inside. It’s an original farmhouse: creaky floorboards, cracking wallpaper, that earthy smell that makes me wonder if he keeps a closet full of dirt somewhere.

“Your daughter is gone for a month?” I say.

He points to a bedroom. “Right here,” he says. “Get changed into something you don’t mind smelling like hog guts.” He limps away.

There’s a four-poster twin bed in the middle of the room with crocheted pillowcases and a stack of quilts on the chair in the corner. It reminds me of my old bedroom. We didn’t have so much land as Linus seems to, but it was fine. I haven’t been back there in ten years, not since my father caught the extra-bad variety of ass cancer and we had to sell it to pay for his treatments. That’s when I moved to the city, met our Karen, and opened a butcher shop. Somewhere in between all of that, I had to move the shop to our apartment, and I also accidentally touched my cousin-in-law’s nipple. But those sorts of details start to blend together now that Karen is knocking boots with you.

I turn Gus loose in the yard, and he bolts off after some critter in the brush, just like he does in the park. He’ll come back after a bit, though. He gets nervous when he hasn’t sniffed me for a while.

Linus has a slaughter pen set up, right next to the hogs. Seems cruel to kill a boar right in front of his cousins, but it’s convenient, and a hog doesn’t know murder from a rusty carburetor choke. They’ll even drink each other’s blood if you don’t separate them.

We stack the wood under the tub and light it and let it start bringing the water to a boil. Then Linus ties the hog off and pops him in the head with a .22 long and we roll him over and jab a knife into the sternum and twist to snag that main artery. We cinch him to the block and tackle, hoist him up over the blood pan, head down. I stop to watch him bleed out for a minute until I feel Linus glaring at me. I haven’t done the actual slaughtering for a long time, and I forgot how much blood there is. The way its mouth hangs open makes it look like it’s trying to squeal or gasp for air. We don’t speak, just work like we ran out of things to say twenty years ago.

Soon we’re scalding him and dragging the bell scrapers over him to rip the hair and scurf off all the way. That’s the dirty work. Nothing like that stringy hog fur stuck to everything, kind of like pubic hair rolled in diarrhea and bacon grease. Probably why I stopped slaughtering them and just did the fine butchering. Once, when I was about seventeen, my father and I slaughtered a sow during the day, and then I took a girl out to the drive-in that night—her name was Brenda—and we were kissing with lots of tongue, and I was working on her bra when she noticed the dark scurf residue stuck under my nails and knuckle creases. I’d showered and used Lava soap and everything, but it’s hard to get rid of that stuff, and naturally, Brenda, who lived in town, screamed every combination of fear and hatred, and I never did get to see her jugs, which was bad enough, but I also had the kind of woody that was so puckered and veiny it actually hurt. You know the kind. You probably get those for our Karen, don’t you? Even now, feeling the scurf on my skin gives me this strange sensation of anger and shame and arousal that I fear Linus will somehow notice.

It’s near dark before we’ve pulled the kidneys and heart and other organs out. Linus doesn’t want to hang him overnight even though I tell him the pork will have a richer flavor.

“It ages just the same,” he says. He clicks his dentures. “Lazy city people.”

I don’t want him thinking I’m lazy, so I start to hack him up and wrap the shanks and hocks and ribs and loins. My father was the best butcher I ever knew, cleaned every scrap, could squeeze an extra cut from a steer’s nose and make it taste like sirloin. Linus isn’t so talented, but he does okay. I show him a few things, about dipping the blade in cold water and keeping it moving with long strokes, about pitching it at the proper angles, about staying with the grain as long as possible. He pretends not to listen to me. “Don’t play smart,” he says. But before long he’s moving faster and not wasting so much. Mostly I can tell he’s the kind of man who does everything himself. I imagine if I kept after him long enough, he could teach me how to make rocks. And he doesn’t seem to tire. He hangs that hand-rolled cigarette from his dry lips and sets to work, never lighting it, just clenching it there and slowly chewing out the tobacco. And he’s quiet in a sturdy old man sort of way, so quiet it makes you feel like a sissy when you start talking, like he outlasted you in some primal game of chess.

“I could take some of this into the city,” I tell him. “Sell it for higher than market price. SoHo. Gramercy. Midtown West—those people love overpaying for anything.”

Linus stares at me for a minute. He doesn’t talk, just clenches that cigarette between his lips. “You trying to steal my pork?”

“No, sir,” I say, and I go back to work.

We slaughter two hogs a day for the first three days. “You do okay with that,” Linus says, “so we’ll stick with it. Don’t want to confuse you.”

Evenings, when we’re finished working, I drive back into the city. It’s a strange sensation: I don’t miss the place, but I’m just so used to being there, it’s like there’s a gravitational pull I can’t escape. Kind of like having a limp that slowly heals. You know, how you end up hobbling longer than you have to because you just get used to it? Gus isn’t thrilled about the situation. He obeys when I open the car door and toss his leash in there, but in that lackadaisical, snooty way that reminds me he’s a teenager in dog years. At first, we head toward the natural history museum. I want to sniff you out, see the guy who’s putting it to my wife.

I pretend Gus is a seeing-eye dog and that I’m blind, and I get away with it longer than you’d think. Just stick an arm in front and pretend to be groping for something. No one wants to question a blind man. But I’m sure they realize I can see just fine when I stare at this exhibit of early Neanderthals hunting a woolly mammoth. It says not to touch, and I don’t, but boy, do I want to peel back the little huntress’s tunic, get a peek at her chest. But I realize I’m an idiot. That kind of thing has gotten me into trouble before—touching someone else’s nipple, which I swear was mostly an accident—and I guess touching the Neanderthal tit wouldn’t really be sticking it to you the way I’d like. And that’s really all I was after. On my way out, I ask the blue-blazered docent if one of his colleagues is bald and talks like a pretentious member of Parliament, but he ignores me. You can understand why, I guess. I wonder now, did they tell you about me later as you sat in your break room, eating your camembert and rye crackers?

I’m running low on money, so I grab some cheap Chinese noodles for dinner. Gus and I end up in Gramercy, wandering the streets. I mutter to myself, thinking of the things I can say when I do bump into the both of you. “Karen,” I could say and remove my hat. “Look at all this hair!” Or I could tell her I’ll start refilling the ice trays and taking her for bacon and pancakes on Saturdays. Or I could say something about not being a fossil, like you are, but I can’t quite work out the phrasing, and I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong and seem like an idiot rural who also happens to have a full head of hair.

I wander the side streets and alleys until I see her car—our car. The little Honda hatchback you’re probably embarrassed about. It’s on a tight one-way right next to the private park, surrounded by Volvos and Audis and glossy black iron fences. I can’t decide if I want to sit on it and wait for her or slash the tires. Gus sniffs around the doors because he smells her and probably thinks that means he’ll get some food. So I wait for almost an hour, leaning against the car, planning my move. I have to be back to the farm in the morning, and it’s a long drive. So I tear off a corner of the Chinese leftover box and leave a note under the windshield wiper: Let’s talk , I write. Gus and I miss you. Call me . Then I write down the number from Linus Houghton’s ad and start on my drive.